Ocarina Originators
Barry “Baz” Jennings and John Taylor, who originated the English four-hole ocarina, and how their website came to be preserved here.
A note from the museum
This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved material from. It is not by the people who made that site.
Ocarina Originators was Barry “Baz” Jennings and John Taylor, and it was their project, their teaching, and their website. Taylor made the first English-style four-hole ocarina in 1964, proportionally tuned so that four holes of graduated size give a full octave; Jennings developed it alongside him. Between them they changed what a small ocarina could do, and the system is still the one most players in Britain learn first.
The site ran at ocarina.demon.co.uk from about 1997, and at ocarinamasters.org as well. Its footer read “Copyright Ocarina Originators 1997 and 2001”, later 2003.
Baz died on August 28, 2004, aged 64, in a London hospice. John Taylor died on February 20, 2011 — news the ocarina world had from Sandi and Richard Schmidt of Clayzeness, who announced it to the Ocarina Making group that March. The same pair had mirrored Baz’s site at his request.
What the museum has preserved
- A History of the Ocarina — their account of the instrument from the Xun to the English four-hole, and a biography of Giuseppe Donati. The most complete copy of it known to survive.
Held privately, unpublished: the whole of both sites as the Internet Archive recorded them, Alan Albright’s memoir “Dance to the Music of the Ocarina, Wilhemina” as it originally ran across six pages, and his 1995 curriculum vitae.
ocarina.demon.co.uk, the original site — captured between 1998 and 2021 across about 430 days:
110 files, 369.7 KB.
| 94 | pages |
| 3 | pages transcribed to plain text |
| 9 | photographs and illustrations |
| 3 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
ocarinamasters.org, Baz’s second site, titled “Welcome to Ocarina Originators” — captured between 2003 and 2012 across about 235 days:
134 files, 523.1 KB.
| 113 | pages |
| 1 | pages transcribed to plain text |
| 6 | photographs and illustrations |
| 14 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Both sit among the sites the museum has copied. Also held is a short memorial page someone put up for John Taylor, who died on February 20, 2011.
Why the history is published, and on what basis
Their own terms reserved all rights and asked that nothing be copied without written permission. That permission can no longer be given by anyone. Baz left no children and no brother; no heir has been found. The work is in copyright until roughly 2074 and no licence for it can be obtained — the UK orphan-works scheme authorises use within the UK only, and the United States has no scheme at all.
Set against that: before he died, Baz asked that the site be kept alive. Richard Schmidt of Clayzeness took it on and mirrored it; a second copy was kept at pollardhosting.com. Richard died on November 29, 2013, clayz.com has since lapsed, and the pollardhosting copy has vanished without trace. Two of the three custodial copies are already gone.
So the museum publishes the history, states the position on the page itself, makes no commercial use of it, names its authors, and will take it down at once should anyone entitled to ask ever wish it. That is a judgement rather than a procedure, and it is set out in full in the museum’s policies.
The rest of it
The history is one page of a large site. Most of what Baz and John made — the teaching materials, the music, the masterclasses, the link pages that mapped the ocarina web of the late 1990s — is preserved here and not published, because no argument has been made for publishing it and none of it is at risk in the way the history was.